PlayStation Vita Review: Finally, Console-Level Gaming in a Handheld Device
23 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Ovum estimates that mobile operators lost $13.9bn in 2011 due to social messaging
22 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, Mobile tech, New Business Models, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution
Facebook Teaches Us That Content Is Still King And That Its Integrity – And The Way It Is Being Presented And By Whom – Matters A Lot
21 02 2012Content is still king – Every status update, every link, every post, is a form of content. Images are not a replacement for compelling content in terms of drawing people to your page. If you are blogging, make sure you cross post it to your page. Share links to articles that speak to the needs and interests of your customers. Become a clearinghouse for everything they need to know about your particular business or product category.
Think historically – With the timeline on our personal profiles, we are no longer confined to the few years for which we’ve been on the platform. I can now post pictures from my entire life, in context, all the way back to 1962. It’s an online scrapbook. If you have any old photos, whether they be from the 1890s or the 1990s, you might want to start scanning and digitizing them.
Much more:
Personal brands compete with corporate brands. Social media has empowered individuals to build a direct audience through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, e-book self-publishing, email direct marketing, etc. And there’s increasing evidence coming from online influence measurement to suggest that personal brands actually exert more pull than established corporate brands in the social media space.
Like it or not, you are a personal brand. Whether you work for yourself or someone else, whether you’re in sales or marketing or you’re a business professional, if you are engaged in an occupation in which you rely your reputation you probably should be thinking seriously about your personal brand. Everyone else is.
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Privacy / Data Protection, Tech Evolution
Ubuntu for Android: Canonical brings Ubuntu desktop to docked smartphones
21 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks. Instead of uploading videos of your cat, you upload software. Anyone can comment on your code and add to it and build it into something better
21 02 2012The trick is that it decentralizes programming, giving everyone a new kind of control. GitHub has shaken up the way software gets written, making coding a little more anarchic, a little more fun, and a lot more productive.
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Apple has sold more iOS devices in the past year than it has sold Macs in 28 years, and that’s given the company an amazing opportunity
21 02 2012It is now in a position to leverage this enormous mobile platform user base and use it to boost Macs sales by tempting them with total integration. No matter whether you’re in front of an iPhone, an iPad, an iPod touch or a Mac, you have access to all your information, reminders and messages.
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution
Book Publisher Penguin Will No Longer Provide eBooks To Libraries
20 02 2012Allegedly this is because they can quite easily make money from similar services themselves and/or they want to renegotiate relevant contracts with both libraries and any new kids on the block.
Publisher Random House will continue to cater to libraries but may increase prices.
Publisher HarperCollins will allow libraries to provide access to their eBooks for (only) 26 times, after that the library has to purchase a ‘new edition’.
Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan are not catering to libraries at all in relation to their eBooks.
Dutch language news article
available via http://www.boekblad.nl/ (payment and registration required)
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Sony’s New Wireless Chip Prototype Can Transfer a Blu-ray’s Disc Worth of Data in Under a Minute
20 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution
Promise recorders capture everything that crosses the airwaves on the 60-odd channels available on the UK’s Freeview service
20 02 2012There are several different recorders, which record all of the TV beamed to your house over a particular period of time. Everything. So you can decide you want to watch shows after they’ve already aired.
http://gizmodo.com/5886544/promise-boxes-are-tivo-for-everything-i-wish-we-had-them
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
New HSPA+ Multiflow Tech Could Double Your Download Speeds
20 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution
The consumer cloud storage consensus is that you should get consistent access to your cloud stored files across your desktop and mobile smart devices
20 02 2012They should be as as accessible to apps on these devices as they would be if the files were stored locally on the device – which, with Dropbox, they are – and should be synced across all connected devices when a version is updated on one of the devices. Some slug of basic storage is free, initially anyway, with extra capacity available at a cost.
There is a distant risk appearing that your cloud storage will be linked to that supplier’s content-playing apps and to that supplier’s content displaying/processing devices, putting you inside an initially lovely walled garden as a a silken-bound captive. You would use iMac, iPad or iPhone to buy music and videos from iTunes, ditto iBooks, store them in iCloud, play/process iCloud data with Apple’s apps, perhaps watch videos on iTV, and be content, locked-in fanbois and fangirlz ever after. Except for the consideration that other suppliers’ content isn’t available, either to buy or to play with.
Google has already started down this path, as has Microsoft and, in the far-off distance, perhaps so will Amazon and Facebook. Granting any supplier a monopoly over significant slugs of your digital data consumption, storage and processing is a risky proposition and open standards are the escape route.
We’ve all been there before and suppliers have supported open standards generally. Whether they’ll continue to do so in the walled smartphone gardens that appear to be coming our way is another matter.
More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/20/skydrive_brazilian/
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Categories : Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution, The Cloud
Why Deep Packet Inspection Is(n’t) Being Talked About (But Used Heavily)
19 02 2012Some of the possible uses of DPI at present include:
- Limited or Tailored Service – For some specialist cases, such as cell phone contracts that are intended to only allow the user access to Facebook or other services, DPI can ensure that this is enforced.
- Policy Control– Broadband providers can ensure that their service-level agreements and acceptable use policies are enforced.
- Bandwidth Management – In addition to monitoring acceptable use and throttling excessive users, DPI can also managed on-the-fly bandwidth management to redistribute traffic loads during busy times.
- Network Security – the ability to detect and intercept viruses, spyware and DDoS attacks before they reach their destination provides the potential for a massive improvement in network security, denying malicious traffic from reaching, and exploiting, vulnerable individual systems.
- Law Enforcement Compliance – DPI technology provides networks with the means for complying with specific law-enforcement requirements in different regions, such as CALEA.
- Quality of Service – The traffic control and bandwidth management abilities of DPI allows service providers to intelligently shape network traffic to prevent heavy users of streaming or P2P services from slowing down the network for other users.
So Where’s the Rub?
The main purpose of Deep Packet Inspection technology is to give users a better experience and to make intelligent delivery of service more manageable for network providers. All of the above applications are primarily aimed at stopping users or software from reducing the quality of service for other users, delivering the expected service or complying with legal requirements, so why is DPI at the centre of so many debates concerning issues as fundamental as free speech, civil liberties and privacy? To understand this it’s worth looking at some high-profile debates, campaigns and recent events to see how DPI fits in.
Much more:
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/why-deep-packet-inspection-isnt-being/
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Categories : Blocking, Education / Awareness, Filtering, Network Security, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution
Android DIY DoS App Boosts Hacktivism in South America
19 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution
Why the Internet of the near future will be radically different
18 02 2012All golden ages (if that is indeed what we are living through) have their dark sides. In the internet’s case, that dark side meant spam, phishing scams, child pornography, and more. But those are not driving the big change in internet.
The big change is this: the internet as a place where one could say, read and download anything, even if none of it is shockingly bad, will not be with us forever. Those freedoms are unlikely to remain unrestricted. Controls and curbs on what users can do, and the content users have access to, will only increase.
The tech-savvy among us will always find ways to get around such curbs. But it will get progressively more difficult, or even illegal, to do so. There are two forces driving this change. First, there are the shifts in the way we use the internet now, as compared to how we did a decade ago.
Second, regulators who wanted to close the arbitrage gap between online and offline worlds, ripping off content, or posting objectionable content is easier online, are getting more determined. So is Big Content (the entertainment industry, media), which has bled from the explosion in illegal downloading. Their attempt to gain control over online content may finally be succeeding, at least to an extent.
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Categories : Education / Awareness, Future Developments?, New Business Models, Public Policy, Tech Evolution
Today’s sysadmin todo list: Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country
18 02 20120. Get corporate membership with EFF.
1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
BBC: Let’s Kill the Internet and Start Over
18 02 2012Viewpoint: The internet is broken – we need to start over … Last year, the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on the internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: to let the internet wither on the vine and start up a new more robust one instead. On being asked if we should start again, many – maybe most – immediately argue that the internet is such an integral part of our social and economic fabric that even considering a change in its fundamental structure is inconceivable and rather frivolous. I was one of those. However, recently the evidence suggests that our efforts to secure the internet are becoming less and less effective, and so the idea of a radical alternative suddenly starts to look less laughable. – BBC/ Prof Alan Woodward, Department of Computing, University of Surrey
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Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Apple Will Turn Their Desktops And Laptops Into Super iPads. Mac OS X Mountain Lion
17 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Pentagon’s Project ‘Avatar’: Same as the Movie, but With Robots Instead of Aliens
17 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Commissioner Kroes Wants To Play World Of Warcraft Really Really Really Fast
17 02 2012Commission today sets out a plan for the EU to reverse its relative decline in High Performance Computing (HPC) use and capabilities. Under this plan the EU will double its investment in HPC (from €630 million to €1.2 billion) and become home to computers that can perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 1018) operations per second (“exa-scale”), before 2020. Half of the investment would be for development and training and for new centres of excellence, creating thousands of jobs.
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Categories : Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Tech Evolution
Dutch students successfully steal laptops in 50% of their (scientific) attempts and create anti-theft algorithm
17 02 2012Algorithm shows weaknesses in local security regimes. Main weakness in their scenario was the susceptibility to social engineering
Dutch language news article:
http://www.security.nl/artikel/40387/1/Studenten_stelen_laptops_voor_studiepunten.html
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Categories : Education / Awareness, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution
This Computer Program Is Smarter Than 96 Percent of Humans
17 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution
Why ‘Big Data’ is a magnet for startups
17 02 2012http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57379492-76/why-big-data-is-a-magnet-for-startups/
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Categories : Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution
European ISPs Fuel IPTV Uptake with Hybrid Superfast Fibre Optic Broadband
16 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution
Creating ebooks on your own computer seems to be an upcoming hit. The past days, several companies have launched new ebook software
16 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution
Obama campaign opens tech field office in San Francisco
16 02 2012Comments : Comments Off
Categories : Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Tech Evolution
